A Sense of Community: From Coding Bootcamp to Clean Energy Startup
Like many people I’ve met in the tech world my path into development wasn’t the most typical. I attended a four year university, albeit graduating with a degree in English and Spanish, and acquired the necessary skills to land a job out of college. My first being a two year assignment as an English teacher in Costa Rica with the Peace Corps. College had always been something I felt obligated to do and getting a degree seemed more like what was expected of me rather than something I felt passionate about. My time in the Peace Corps taught me that I learned way more by doing, proven by the fact I learned more Spanish in three months of living in Central America than in 8 years of sitting in a classroom. It was here in Costa Rica that my journey began when I built a static HTML site for a Peace Corps project. This eventually led to spending my nights completing coding challenges on an outdated Mac Book and personal projects consisting of pasting fragmented pieces of code together while attending the university of Stack Overflow.
Self teaching was only getting me so far and I knew I was lacking a certain aspect of the tech industry. Community. The thought of going back to school for another four years seemed improbable, but I eventually stumbled upon the world of coding bootcamps. I began reading every website with their guarantees of a job after graduating making salaries from 70–100 thousand dollars. Pictures of alumni working for Google and Facebook splattered their home pages. The realist in me knew these advertising tactics were too good to be true and I started to research outside of the school’s sites themselves. I read some success stories but the one’s that stuck out, as they tend to do, were the negative reviews. People investing all this time and money into a program and still leaving jobless. Even Bloomberg got in on the action and stated anyone who wanted a job in Silicon Valley should stay away from coding bootcamps. Now all these criticism may be right, and maybe some people leave these schools feeling like they were robbed and unprepared for their first tech job. But I had a different experience.
The Bootcamp
One of the criticisms I encountered most often about boot camp grads was that the market was becoming saturated. Many schools were accepting anyone who applied and could pay the price. The lure of a high paying salary immediately after graduating seemed to lure in anyone who thought that programming may be right for them. I knew I didn’t want to be just another number so I only focused on the schools that had a strict acceptance process and required months of pre-work before accepting eligible applicants. I began applying to schools which usually included filling out an application about why you wanted to attend. Some immediately offered you a spot which was a red flag for me. The more reputable schools required extensive pre-work to prepare you for their technical interview. The technical interviews were tough, which was both intimidating but also a good sign. They were serious about their applicants and only wanted people who took this career path seriously. After eagerly waiting for replies, I was eventually accepted by the Flatiron School in NYC. They stood out to me because of their 5% acceptance rate, their job guarantee, and their in house platform they used for administering the pre-work.
Upon arriving at Flatiron’s campus in lower Manhattan, they immediately throw you into coding. The program is only three months and as expected there is no time to waste. The first thing they instill in you is the concept of getting out what you put in. This isn’t a formal university with grades and due dates. You’re given more work than you can handle and it’s up to you to be your own advocate. Days tended to consist 1/3 of lectures in which the more complicated topics were covered and the rest of the days were spent completing assignments which they called ‘Labs’. These Labs were a series of complex, incomplete, code challenges where we were supposed to complete the code in order to make a series of tests pass. The campus was open floor which encouraged collaboration and was the exact thing I knew I was lacking with self teaching. Being able to discuss code and talk through problems with other people proved to be invaluable and where most of my learning occurred. Solving problems through code was no longer something I faced alone, with only online forums as my source of insight. I learned things I never even encountered before like the power of Bash and the speed of productivity by mastering Vim. (Something I’m still working on)
Flatiron was a full stack program and the first language we learned was Ruby and eventually Rails. While the memorization of methods and syntax proved necessary and helpful, it was the lessons we were taught on programming concepts and principles that were the most valuable. Diving deep into object oriented programming became my favorite topic and I started to learn the difference between code that just works, and good code. After a month of learning Ruby on Rails we had our first big project. We were split into groups of three and given free reign to build a real working application. The project lasted a week and this was our first insight into what it may be like working as a developer. Our days consisted of talking through ideas, developing a timeline for deliverables, and splitting up roles for the project. I tried to pay attention to these moments because I knew they would provide answers to eventual job interview questions.
Our second language was Javascript given that its the foundation of front end development. The world is dominated by frameworks now but having a core understanding of Javascript and its quirks is essential. Our second big project was a Javascript/jQuery based application. I saw this as a litmus test on Javascript and caused you to face all the frustrations that modern frameworks try to solve. Our lessons on jQuery were light and we learned that using jQuery for a project can quickly get out of hand and the state of your application suddenly becomes spaghetti code. This was the perfect precursor to our final section of the course: React/Redux.
When I first started learning about front end development there seemed to be a constant struggle about which framework to choose. It seemed like every time a new frame work emerged, a new one was in development about to take it’s place. As a beginner developer I had no idea where to start with front end frameworks so it was grounding to be taught one from the beginning and told to put all the others on the back burner for a while. React was a breath of fresh air after learning vanilla Javascript and jQuery. Things started to make sense in the context of a framework and the introduction of Redux provided a solution to the previous problem of managing the state of your application into an single source of truth. Although React is a relatively new framework, Flatiron did an excellent job of introducing us to it and teaching us everything we’d need to build a single page application.
Our final project which consumed the last two weeks of the course was a full stack application using a Ruby on Rails backend with a React/Redux front end. Although the groups for previous projects were assigned randomly, it seems our instructors did a good job of noticing who each student worked well with and our final groups reflected that. The final project was an excellent review of everything we learned the past 2 and a half months. This was when I had the realization that I had come from copy and pasting code from the internet, to working on a team and building a real world application complete with authentication, member accounts, integrated databases, and data modeling. We were forced to solve problems end to end and create something that was hosted on the internet and could have actual users. We presented our projects in the final week to potential and current students along with employers looking to hire new talent.
The final week of class was a Campus draft where each student was matched up with 4–6 potential employers in sort of a speed interview setting. We each had 30 minutes to interview with a member of the company and convince them we were a junior developer worth having. Some employers had previously hired students from Flatiron and some were completely new to the school. Even if you weren’t hired by any of the few companies you interviewed with it still provided practice in one of the most essential skills we needed. How to sell ourselves.
Upon graduation you are matched with a career counselor who helps you work on your resume, network, and practice interviewing. They occasionally would have an employer they could put you in contact with but the majority of the job search was up to you. You had to find your own ways of getting noticed and securing that rare first interview. Upon researching companies to work for there was one that stood out among the rest. And that’s how I started at Inspire.
The Startup
I’ll leave the interview process out of this post because there are infinite interviewing resources out there and each one will be different so there’s no use adding to the saturation. I will, however, say two things and that is: 1. Never stop coding. Find sites and applications that you think should be better and make them better. Recreate things that already exist and you’ll see challenges you never thought about. You’ll have a whole new appreciation for programs and those who develop them. 2. Show passion for the job you’re applying for. Especially when you have no real work experience this is the one thing you can have more than any other applicant regardless of skill. And applying to Inspire made that a little too easy for me.
I have to say that when I started at Inspire I had an anticipated feeling of Imposter Syndrome. The only thing I had ever worked on were code challenges and personal projects, and suddenly I was given access to an enormous code base that developers far more talented than I had created. I combed through controllers wondering how I could ever understand where they connected, I read SQL statements longer than my Atom window, and I had to learn a whole new front end framework from scratch (Angular). I thought to myself there was no way I was ever going to get caught up to speed with all of this in a reasonable amount of time and it was going to take me far too long to become a productive member of the team. The one thing I did know was that I was excited about the challenge.
The days went by and I started to understand the code base more and more. Things started to click and I was submitting pull requests for features and fixing bugs much sooner than I had anticipated. I can honestly say two things have contributed to me being where I am and that is what I learned at school and the amazingly talented developers I work with on a daily basis. They never made me feel like a beginner despite how much I felt that way, and they were there to help me with any problem I was facing. I started to learn that nothing is impossible with software. I would spend hours on a feature, eventually concluding it was impossible, only to have another developer come over and give me that ‘a ha’ moment. Rubber ducking became a concept that was not only true, but necessary for problems to get solved.
Many may not be as fortunate as I am, but something I learned working at a start up was that believing in the mission of the company is essential to performing at your full potential. Personal projects are great, and it’s liberating to make all the decisions in the direction of a code base, but the feeling of building technology that has the potential to change the world is unrivaled. We’re living in a time where our impact on the planet is becoming more and more extreme and our leaders are making the decisions to go backwards in time when it comes to climate change, however I have the opportunity to be part of a company, and build the technology, that is a driving force in a cleaner energy future. Our CTO said it best with his response to Trump’s recent withdrawal from the Paris Climate deal:
“However, we’re in this for the long fight. We feel more emboldened than ever that what we’re doing is even more important today than it was before this decision. Our members joined Inspire because they want a cleaner, brighter energy future and that’s what we’re building. Disappointed?…yes, but we all got here a little earlier than normal today, we’ll roll up our sleeves and we’ll rally around our mission.”
Thinking back to what was missing most from my early stages of learning to program was the need for community. Through three months of intense study at Flatiron, and another three months of learning from the talented developers at Inspire, I realized that community was more important than I ever imagined. Not only have I gained a sense of community with my tech team at Inspire, but I’ve also been given the opportunity to be part of the clean energy movement. A group of people who despite decisions made by those in power, wake up everyday with a purpose to use the skills we’ve acquired to make the world a better place to live. And that’s more community than I ever could have asked for.
